As a child, I could always hear the horns from the diesels on the main line of the mighty New York Central, in the early morning as I woke up or at night drifting off to sleep. One of the spots the engineer sounded the horn was at a grade crossing about ten miles away, along a sandy spot bordered by pine trees where cars could pull off the road and watch the trains that sped by. My father sometimes took me there on a summer’s afternoon. I could picture the trains rushing by, on their way to Chicago and all points west, or returning east, soon to parallel the Hudson River all the way down to New York. It might have been a passenger train, carrying important people to a conference or movie stars to a premier or just ordinary people making a trip to visit family. It could have been a mail train carrying greetings of joy or heartbreak to post offices great and small. It could have been a fast freight of green railway express, refrigerated cars containing critical medical supplies to Boston, or a slow, dirty coal train, hauling the day’s fuel to the power plant below Albany.
They were all necessary, and I in my limited way realized it. In bed I would just listen, or when I was able to get trackside, I would wave at the engineer or conductor standing by one of the open Dutch doors of the passenger cars, who often acknowledged my presence by smiling and waving back. I realized they beckoned to connect me to a much greater world, and that someday, somehow, I would accept the invitation to be a part of that world. Someday, I would be on a journey, in motion while others were reading the paper, sitting down at the kitchen table and eating, or drifting off to sleep.
As I got older, I took the sound of the trains for granted, while at the same time, the trains became considerably fewer. As I reflect back, however, I’ve usually lived in hearing of a train. Even today, when it is quiet and the wind is right, I can hear the one serving the power plant or salt mine down by the lake. I know it’s not going very far, but the rails still connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Nowadays I also live close to the flight path of one of the landing runways of the airport. For me it doesn’t have the same nostalgic romance of a train, but one comes to expect the last evening plane from Philadelphia to fly over as it descends into Ithaca, and in the summer when the windows are open, one notices more when it is late than when it is on time. Nonetheless, that plane is also a reminder that I, too, have taken off, defied gravity, and returned from horizons miles away, and have made that larger world a part of my consciousness. The plane is a symbolic doorway to a greater reality than my own petty limitations worries and cares.
In the Gospel today Jesus was worshiping at the synagogue near the shore of a small town on Lake Galilee. He was asked to read what would have been the appointed lesson, a lesson from one of the last chapters in the book of the prophet Isaiah and written years later by one of the followers of the original prophet. This later follower offered the vision of God reconstituting Israel, after years of exile. And that vision was framed by an ancient tradition of tribal times of what was called a jubilee year, a holy year in which indentured servants were set free, debts were canceled, mortgaged property returned and amnesty and pardon granted. “The spirit of the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty, recovery, freedom.” Jesus interpreted these words as a sign that the Gospel that he was setting out to teach was like a wondrous jubilee year. Jesus rolled up the scroll and announced, ”Today the jubilee year begins among you, today the saving grace of God is loose in the world.”
For Luke, today was the operative word for the church’s mission. The process is beginning, God’s gift of salvation of rescuing, of reconciling and restoring humanity is being fulfilled. “Today,” proclaims Jesus, “I testify to a new world reality beyond the hills of your birth, beyond even the boundaries of the mighty Roman Empire, and you are a part of it.”
Like all profound change, the disclosure and call to explore new horizons can be frightening. The usual response is to draw back, shut such suggestions out of our hearing, and push such things away. That, as we will read next week, is what the people at the synagogue did on that day long ago. They got scared, and they rejected and pushed Jesus away.
Being touched by God’s spirit involves awareness that we are part of a body in motion, being led beyond our time and horizons. Coming to terms with that can be difficult. I know now that hearing the diesel horns while snuggled in my bed, was a much more comfortable and less taxing experience than some of the trains I actually rode. Nonetheless, neither trains nor planes are meant to stand idling at stations or airports; nor is the Gospel meant simply to protect us where we are, but to take us to extend new frontiers, bridge new horizons, and connect us to that larger world we could never, ever imagine.
And I offer this to you in the name of the Living God, Amen.
